ABSTRACT
James Wilson’s chapter “Unfit to Teach” raises difficult and fascinating questions about the regularity with which popular media depicts teachers as aberrations of the social norms that the public trusts them to teach. The common characteristic of perversity in the dramatic characters that Wilson chooses is not a matter of lack or deficiency, however but a strange abundance experienced by audiences as a transgressive sort of pleasure. In this response essay, the transgressive pleasure of the immoral teacher is understood as a way of reinstating personhood outside the discursive norms that provide a future for society but often leave the individual behind.
